Historically, residential electric power consumption has been measured with electromechanical meters. These electromechanical devices have long been priced as commodities, dependent on the extremely low cost of materials and volume manufacturing processes. In today's residential meter market there is a shift away from electromechanical meters to electronic meters, with a focus still on minimizing product cost. There are several major providers of solid state electric meters, each with a different design approach to deliver essentially the same set of standards-based power-measuring functionality.
Some current electric meter designs comprise an electronics housing, including a main circuit board, and a meter base, including a current sensing module. Typically, such electric meter designs require a user to manually couple the electronics housing to the meter base. The manual installation process may take a substantial amount of time, during which a user may have to carefully connect and align various included electric meter components. The complexity of the manual installation process of a typical electric meter may substantially increase the cost of providing the electric meter at a residential location.